Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Back to Three/Dirty Clothes

In the past week, the Naw has lost two of its squatters and one of its essential/well-used appliances.

Diego and Becca relocated to their respective apartments and reunited with (Diego)/met for the first time (Becca) their roommates at the beginning of the month. Diego lives closer to Logan Square proper now (closer to us than he was back in his Gold Coast days, but not quite as close as next door) and Becca moved to the alley. Just kidding, but for real she lives the next street over and it takes 30 seconds to get from my bedroom to hers.

Becca has two brand new roommates, who we are excited to befriend because A) they are not a part of the Mercy Bubble, and B) that's basically our only requirement for making possible friends right now. One of them is a friend of a friend of Brooke's and the other is a friend of Bailey's, small world! (Also Becca, if you are reading this, hope you don't mind I am using your life for fodder.)

Now it's kind of quiet here...but not too quiet. An appropriate amount of quiet for three people living in a three bedroom apartment who aren't coming and going at all hours of the day seven days a week like an apartment filled with people all on different schedules. (I wondered many times what our downstairs neighbors thought of the nearly never-ending parade of people going up and down our steps.)

As for the appliance currently out of commission, I'm talking about our washing machine. Probably the biggest selling point of our apartment (even above the porch, roof hatch, dark wood paneling and pillars, and yes, even the built-in hutch), our in-unit washing machine has seen younger days. This past month we put it through the wringer (haha!) with several extra people's dirty clothes, plus all the dirty linens a tenement-style household has, which is apparently too much for the poor thing.

The machine no longer drains, rinses, or spins, which we found out after several experimental loads. Doubting our landlord would spring for a new machine, Brit and I decided to de-clog the drain this weekend. FYI: this is not a simple task & merely removing all visible screws will not help you accomplish this task. We found the drain and the pump and pretty much saw all the inner workings of the machine, but didn't have the confidence to start unhooking hoses and pulling apart wires, so broken it sits until we try again later this week.

And try we will--we did more research Jesus worked some Google magic and found a repair video featuring our exact machine and what we hope is the exact problem, so now we are set, assuming we can find a time when we are both home and not busy. You'll know we've fixed it when my pile of dirty clothes is no longer the same height (or higher) than my pile of books to read.